The Hellenistic World and Rome
(, , ): ‘‘There are also other tribes of Arabs, of whom some even culti-
vate the soil, intermingled with the tax-paying peoples, and [who] share the
customs of the Syrians, except that they dwell in tents.’’
I return below to the question of the movement of Arab peoples into
Syria and their settlement there, a subject discussed in an interesting way by
Dussaud.^64 For the moment note Diodorus’ contrast between Arabs living in
tents and those in settled populations who can be made to pay taxes. In many
parts of the Syrian region, in the mountains and on the fringes of the desert
above all, the Seleucid (or Ptolemaic) state either never had or only occa-
sionally had any effective presence as the Achaemenids before them, who,
however, maintained a contractual relationship with them.^65
Most of what I have been saying so far has been designed to suggest how
limited, variable, and erratic the Greek presence in the different parts of the
Syrian region was in the Hellenistic period, at any rate so far as our present
evidence shows. I now wish to look at the other side, and ask what if anything
we know of the non-Greek culture of the area, or of essentially non-Greek
communities within it. The Phoenician cities of the coast preserved their
historical identity and culture, while evolving, by steps which we cannot
really trace, into Greek cities.^66 A similar evolution seems to have taken place
in the ancient Philistine cities further south, Azotus, Ascalon, and Gaza.^67 As
with many other places in the Near East, their non-Greek, or not wholly
Greek, identity is expressed most clearly in dedications made on Delos. Per-
haps the most striking example is the well-known dedication by a man from
Ascalon: ‘‘To Zeus Ourios and Astarte Palestine and Aphrodite Ourania, the
listening gods, Damon son of Demetrios, of Askalon, having been saved from
pirates, [offers his] prayer. It is not permitted to introduce [here] a goat, pig,
or cow.’’^68 The notion that these, or any other existing communities, could
be made into Greek cities purely by the issue of some sort of charter or the
granting of a Greek constitution, without either a settlement or building
operations, still seems to me to need further examination. It is more in ac-
cordance with the evidence to see these coastal cities as places which had
. R. Dussaud,La pénétration des Arabes en Syrie avant l’Islam(Paris, ); see also
P. Briant,Etat et pasteurs au Moyen-Orient ancien(), chap. (an important study); and
I. Shahid,Rome and the Arabs().
. Briant (n. ), ff.
. Millar (n. ).
. K. Rappaport, ‘‘Gaza and Ascalon in the Persian and Hellenistic Periods in Relation
to Their Coins,’’IEJ (): ff.; Schürer, Vermes, and Millar,HistoryII, –.
.IDno. ; P. Bruneau,Recherches sur les cultes de Délos à l’epoque hellénistique et à
l’epoque impériale(), –.